Going For The Green

Municipalities Hoping To Cash In On Golfing Fever

"I'm working on my draw," Naylor explains, adjusting the bill of his cap, which reads: "Kel-Kore Core Drilling, Slab Sawing." He rearranges his feet-in heavy work boots-on the carefully tended sod. "See, for a high handicapper like me, the tendency is to slice. A draw corrects that."

The white ball arcs again.

Naylor, a 40-year-old Evergreen Park resident, caddied as a kid and never lost his taste for the game, but only returned to it five years ago.

"It costs money, you know," he says. Which is why he made his way to the driving range at the soon-to-debut Meadows at Blue Island golf course owned by the city of Blue Island, where the buckets of balls are cheap, the atmosphere friendly and the locale preeminent, meaning "on the way home from work."

Naylor (no white-sweatered, country club fop, he) is the kind of player the city of Blue Island hopes to attract with its new 138-acre golf facility, an 18-hole course spread over a former landfill site, due to open later this summer. The driving range is already up and running.

As it happens, Blue Island is just one in a series of municipalities in the southern suburbs that are counting on golf courses-jumping aboard the careering golf cart on the road to green links, a proven cash cow. Some municipalities hope profits eventually will bring in more than $1 million annually.

Currently, communities such as Alsip, New Lenox, Oak Lawn, Blue Island and the Illinois International Port District on Chicago's Southeast Side are building golf courses, all but one (the New Lenox site) on former landfills. Expected costs of the projects range from $2.5 million to $10 million.

And local duffers are finding municipal golf is cheaper and more convenient, as well as a surprisingly viable alternative to members-only concerns.

"I'm not the country-club type," explains Dan Krause, 34, a Crestwood resident and owner of a Popeye's Famous Fried Chicken establishment, taking a break between shifts to work his way through a bucket of balls at the Meadows. He sees a lot of his customers there, which wouldn't be the case at a tony private country club. Here, he says, it's "not as stuffy."

The number of public golf courses-both municipal and privately owned-has risen more than 26 percent since 1980, to more than 9,000 nationwide, according to the National Golf Foundation, based in Jupiter, Fla. Such a rise is helping change the face of golf, giving the sport a more egalitarian feel. (If you mention that word to a golf pro, he may not know what it means, much less agree.)

"Aw, I always golfed, and I was never rich," Walsh scoffs.

Public golfers are more fickle than club players, who play the same course over and over and get used to the way the balls roll and the land breaks, explains Bob Lohmann, a golf course architect and the president of Lohmann Golf Designs Inc. in Marengo. His firm is working on the nine-hole public course in Alsip that will open in 1995.

"Public golfers like golf holes that are memorable but playable," he says. "The public golfer wants to play quick, score good and pay nothing to play."

Some suburban municipal courses, however, are gaining competitive reputations, a far cry from the days when the course that became the revamped and well-manicured Schaumburg Golf Club was dubbed "Concrete Acres" because of the parking-lot nature of the greens.

"It's a well-kept secret that is just beginning to be discovered," he says.

Most of those municipal golf courses already up and operating are, for the most part, living up to expectations. For example, Palos Hills recently refinanced the original $1.8 million loan for its golf course and expects to see profits this summer for the first time since opening in 1991.

And there are other benefits as well. At Blue Island, for example, Frasor says the city's $5.8 million golf course is expected to reap $800,000 annually. The manmade rolling hills are mostly still bare, but the course is nonetheless already having an effect on the surrounding neighborhood, where a Bloomingdale developer is building new townhomes.

"I expect a dramatic increase in property values," Frasor says. Five years ago, she says, a home in that neighborhood would sell for $52,000 to $54,000. Now, homes adjacent to the golf course sell in the $85,000 range.

Not to mention that creating a golf course is one of the few viable ways to pretty-up an old garbage dump.